Attend a meeting on "Bag Use in Boulder" from 5:30 to 7 p.m. Sept. 20 in the Delwood Room of the West Senior Center, 909 Arapahoe Ave.

The city will accept feedback on the proposed fee until 5 p.m. Sept. 21.

Boulder shoppers may soon have to pay a 20-cent fee to use a plastic or paper disposable bag at the grocery store.

City environmental officials recommended the fee after the City Council supported the idea in theory earlier this year and a consultant found that covering the full costs of disposable bags to the community would require a fee of almost 20 cents.

The city's Environmental Advisory Board will discuss the proposed fee at its meeting Wednesday, and the city is seeking public feedback on the bag fee both online and at a meeting next week.

The City Council is scheduled to vote on first reading of an ordinance establishing a 20-cent fee on Oct. 16.

The proposed fee would apply to all disposable checkout bags distributed at grocery and convenience stores. If the ordinance is adopted, it wouldn't take effect until July 2013, in part to give stores time to switch to new procedures.

The aim of the fee is to get Boulder shoppers to switch to reusable bags.

"The goal of this fee is to eventually have very little money come in," said Jamie Harkins, Boulder business sustainability specialist. "Our goal is to get as close to no bag use as possible as soon as possible."

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The city plans to distribute free, reusable shopping bags as part of an education campaign associated with the fee, Harkins said.

"We're really going to partner to do outreach to folks, especially in the low-income communities, so they don't feel the brunt of this," she said.

The City Council voted 7-1 in May to adopt an unspecified fee on plastic and paper disposable bags. Some council members said they would prefer an outright ban on plastic bags, a move that was urged -- albeit unsuccessfully -- by student activists from Fairview High School's Net Zero Club. Representatives of the city's recycling industry, however, preferred a fee on both types of disposable bags.

Boulder hired consultants from TischlerBise Inc. to determine what the fee should be. Those consultants looked at what plastic bags now cost, both directly and in indirect costs to the area's waste management companies, who sometimes have to stop equipment and pull out bags by hand. They also looked at what it would cost to administer a bag fee, including additional costs to grocery stores and costs to the city for education and distribution of free, reusable bags.

That cost totaled $0.199, which city officials rounded up to 20 cents.

While city environmental officials are recommending the 20-cent fee, they still want to hear feedback from the Environmental Advisory Board and the public, Harkins said.

TischlerBise reported that other cities with bag fees have seen reductions in disposable bag use ranging from 50 percent to as high as 95 percent. However, there tends to be a "rebound" effect, in which shoppers start using disposable bags again at higher rates after a fee has been in place for a while.

Harkins said the city plans to assess the impact of the fee over the next few years.

Many Boulder-area shoppers support the idea of a fee.

"I don't think it's a bad idea," Nederland native Ryan Biddle, 21, said as he used cloth bags to carry his groceries at King Soopers in Boulder on Tuesday. "There are too many plastic bags floating around this world."

James Hudson, of Longmont, said he, too, would support the fee, though a friend he was with used a plastic bag to transport some merchandise out of the Boulder Target.

"The waste is a big problem, and it's a small habit for us to break," Hudson said. "People will get adjusted to it, just like they do everything else."

University of Colorado student Kiwi Landry, 21, said she has cloth bags that she usually uses while shopping, but she sometimes leaves them at home, and she doesn't feel she should have to pay the bag fee when that happens.

"It makes sense environmentally ... but personally, I forget to bring my own bags a lot, so it wouldn't really feel right," she said.

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